Diana Leafe Christian, author of Finding Community and Creating a Life Together will be a keynote speaker at a communities gathering this November 21 at La Cité Écologique Ham du Nord, a 25-year-old ecovillage settlement in Québec. The day-long event will celebrate the publication of the first French-language directory of ecovillages and ecologically sustainable settlements in Québec and will feature many community activists including Leslie Carbonneau, author of this first French-language communities directory, and Michel Degagnés, who is a core group member of Cohabitat Québec, a forming cohousing community in Québec City. Diana sent along the following guest post on dealing with blocks to consensus in communities. It makes for a fascinating read. Thanks Diana!

I serve as a consultant to intentional communities experiencing conflict -- ecovillages, cohousing communities, and other kinds of communities. Some communities (and nonprofits, and other groups) suffer unnecessary conflict when they use consensus decision-making but don't really understand that people using the consensus process aren't supposed to block proposals for purely personal reasons. Consensus requires that people block only when the proposal violates the group's shared, agreed-upon values, purpose, lifestyle, and/or behavioral norms, but not someone's personal values, lifestyle, etc.

(If you're not familiar with this decision-making method, it's one in which people modify a proposal in order to meet people's concerns, and then approve it only if everyone can support it, or at least live with it. People don't vote Yes or No. Rather, their three decision options are (1) to approve the proposal; (2) to "stand aside" from the proposal, which means they don't support it but won't stop it; and (3) to "block" the proposal, which means they're stopping it and the proposal is not adopted. In pure consensus, it takes only one block to stop a proposal.)

Several consensus trainers I know suggest that organizations adopt criteria for assessing whether a block to a proposal is a "principled block," also known as a "valid block" or a "legitimate block". This means the organization and/or its facilitator can test a block against the group's agreed-upon criteria, and if it doesn't meet that criteria, they declare the block invalid and the proposal passes.

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